Kate's farm: After the wash-out

Kate Humble takes stock after a wash-out summer

Kate Humble and her husband, Ludo, have launched an ambitious plan to preserve a Monmouthshire farm and use its old buildings as a centre to teach rural skills and animal husbandry. Here Kate reports on their progress:

It has been a challenging summer, mainly because where I live we don’t seem to have had a summer, just an extended wet season – a monsoon without the warmth. In July I found myself putting on the same clothes I was wearing in February, with the still-soggy waterproof trousers and coat I had worn the day before and the day before that on top, and it was hard to suppress thoughts of jacking it all in and running away to the Sahara, or the Atacama, or anywhere in the world where it hasn’t rained for years rather than minutes.

Although on top of a hill, our land is unusually flat for our part of the world, and the water table high, and more often than not over the past couple of months the farm has looked more like a water park. Every little dip and depression became a pond; drainage ditches were like mountain streams in spate, frequently overflowing and pooling across the lanes. Gateways became water jumps even the British Olympic eventing team would have balked at, and the rain, unable to soak into the sodden ground, poured off the fields and gathered in a great muddy lake around the farmhouse that we have spent months battling to make damp-proof.

Enter Kelvin, a man who not only can achieve wonders with a digger and a dumper truck, but is also able to wander about the fields with a couple of bits of wire and find water pipes, underground drainage channels, wells and springs. His justifiably famous dousing skills helped him design a network of drains and ditches that has meant, probably for the first time ever, that the farm isn’t swamped every time the rain sweeps across from the Black Mountains.

Our land is not suitable for crops, and this year that may be a blessing. The farming press has been full of photographs of arable farmers standing gloomily amid ruined crops. There is much talk of low yields and poor quality. A friend of ours, David Wilson, who manages the Duchy Home Farm in Gloucestershire, said he had never known a summer like it. 'Farmers are used to dealing with the contrary nature of the British weather, it is simply part of the job description, but this year has been like no other. I’ve been talking to some of the old boys who work with us, and none of them can recall a summer of such extreme and sustained rainfall as this. The knock-on effects could be huge and not just for farmers, but for consumers, too.’ He’s right, of course, but farmers will bear the brunt of rising feed costs and poor yields. And as the ongoing battle in the dairy industry is proving, there comes a point when it is no longer economically possible for farmers to continue farming.

Tim Stephens, who farms our 100 acres, still has the grass to worry about. Spring brought a good batch of lambs, but cold, wet weather has meant the grass hasn’t grown well so, as on many neighbouring farms, neither have the lambs. Fields left ungrazed for hay and silage to feed his livestock through the winter have been too wet to cut. The ground is so wet that even a couple of dry days are not enough, because if mud gets into the bales it can introduce listeria, which kills animals that eat it. Never have weather forecasts been so studied, as every farmer in the county waited for a dry spell long enough for them to get into their fields. When it came, the sound of tractors, mowers and balers echoed across every hillside well into the night in the desperate effort to get the job done before the return of the rain. Bales of silage wrapped in black plastic now lie scattered across three of the five fields Tim has managed to cut. As I write, the remaining two are still too wet, but perhaps we can now dare to hope that as we have had our Indian-style monsoon, the Indian summer is just around the corner.